From Bean to Cup Part 4: Importing and Exporting Coffee
Soon-to-be-roasted green coffee stored in sacks
How the coffee gets from the farmer to the roastery
When coffee leaves a producer, it can go in several ways, and this is where things can get a bit unclear because of all the parties that can get involved.
The most direct way for a coffee to get from a farm to a roastery is just that - the farmer can export it themself and sell it directly to a roastery (this is how we get most of our coffee!) Alternatively, a farmer can take one of two routes: sell it to an importer or to an exporter. If a farmer sells their coffee to a third-party importer, the importer will store that coffee as well as coffees and sell it to roasteries. If the farmer sells to an exporter (which can be a third-party or a cooperative of farmers), the coffee can take an even longer route because the exporter can either sell the coffee to a roastery or they can to an importer who then trades with roasteries.
These are the general paths the coffee can make, but there are other ways that more parties can get involved. If beans are produced on a small farm, and the producer sells the beans to a mill. The miller can then sell to an exporter, who sells it to an importer, who sells it to roasteries. The exporting and importing steps of this chain require a great deal of politics, knowledge, and financial risk, and many “Direct Trade” farmers, including Penstock Coffee, import coffee through an importing company, even when they buy the actual coffee directly from a farmer, not an importer. Some (but few) larger Direct Trade companies, handle export/import logistics. A few are vertically integrated from the farm or mill through import/export to the roastery and even cafe. But even in the case of vertically integrated companies, many outsource importing and exporting to third party professionals to minimize risk.
When it comes to actual shipping, coffee gets shipped, literally. In a ship. Air shipping would be extremely expensive, as coffee is exported in 60-70kg burlap sacks that are shipped in containers that can hold 26,000 lbs. In Brazil, the country that exports more coffee than any other country in the world, coffee is shipped in even larger containers. At some point from one port to another, an importer will take possession of the coffee. Typically, they own all the coffee in the container, but they sometimes handle a whole container or individual bags on behalf of someone else - like a Direct Trade roastery like Penstock. Importers then handle the coffee through customs and direct it to a warehouse before distributing it to roasting customers - or placing it on lists to sell to roasters later on.
The price paid at each step in the chain will go up, but that does not determine the fairness of the transaction at the farm level. Because the coffee has been bought and sold at least once if not up to five times (in some countries, like Yemen, even more), the price paid by a roaster does not indicate what the farm owner or other people along the supply chain were paid or what their work conditions were like. However, people who drink coffee are becoming more interested in finding out where their coffee is coming from. People in coffee and tech have even teamed up to use blockchain technology to make information about a coffee’s supply chain transparent and secure. We are doing our best to do our part in paying farmers well the fair trade prices for their coffee, and hope that as the industry moves forward, more positive changes equity will develop at all levels of the coffee supply chain.